The Challenging Life and Violent Death of Barry Shantz

On Jan. 13, 2020, Barry Shantz was shot and killed by an RCMP officer following a six-hour standoff with authorities.

Sixty-three years old at the time of his death, Shantz had led a tumultuous life. He was a long-haul trucker, a drug dealer, an inmate, a father and in the later chapters of his life, an activist advocating for harm reduction and the rights of unhoused people in Abbotsford, B.C. After family members alerted authorities about Shantz’s capacity for self-harm, his death presented the worst possible outcome of a challenging situation.

In the wake of her brother’s death, Shantz’s sister Marilyn Farquhar began making a series of quilts as a means of addressing her grief and anger. In the patterns of her work, Farquhar stitched together the different shades of dark and light that made up the full scope of her brother’s complicated life and death.

Toronto film director Ian Daffern’s documentary A Bullet Pulling Thread uses Farquhar’s quilts as the organizing conceit for a film that functions both as an investigation into Shantz’s death as well as a nuanced portrait of the man himself.

Farquhar called her series of creative quilts Kairos, after the Greek word for “right” or “critical moment.” The individual works capture her grief, confusion and desire for greater attention to be paid to her brother’s death.

Collectively, the quilts offer a kind of cathartic investigation. In a self-portrait entitled “One Bullet,” the news of Shantz’s death is agonizingly captured in Farquhar’s reaction, her head buried in her hands, while behind her are depictions of the faces of people affected by his passing.

Another quilt, called “His Call for Help,” centred a conversation that Shantz had with his sister, where he talked about his struggles with his mental health. Embroidered in undulating lines across the centre of the quilt: “I’m such a piece of shit. I’ve only caused heartache and sorrow. The pain in my brain is unacceptable.”

At the time of that conversation, Farquhar recalls that she didn’t really understand or hear what her brother was trying to tell her. But in hindsight, his words portend ominously.

A quilt called “May Your Spirit Soar” features the image of an eagle in full flight. It alludes to Shantz’s involvement with a birding organization dedicated to finding eagles.

In order to raise awareness about her brother’s death, Farquhar travelled to British Columbia from her home in Ontario with the intent of displaying her quilts in the park where Shantz often worked with the unhoused community.

This self-organized exhibition came about, in part, because a number of galleries declined to show the quilts due to their political nature.

Partying hard, raising hell

Farquhar is the emotional heart of the film as she recounts the details of the siblings’ shared childhood in Kitchener, Ontario. Born into a Mennonite family, Shantz left home at age 17, while his sister, four years younger, was just entering her teens.

Even as a teenager, Shantz was something of a hell-raiser. He moved out west and got a job in a mine with help from an uncle. The straight life did not last long, and soon enough Shantz’s hard-partying lifestyle brought him into contact with people who used, bought and sold hard drugs.

In his new job as a long-distance trucker, Shantz set up a side hustle of moving large quantities of cannabis and hash concealed in secret compartments inside his vehicle. As he became more involved in the drug trade, the scale and scope of activities escalated, culminating in one of the largest drug seizures in American history.

U.S. authorities raided the Lucky Star, a container ship registered in Afghanistan that was smuggling more than 70 tonnes of hashish, with a purported street value of $1.3 billion.

Shantz was arrested outside of San Francisco and served more than a decade in an American prison. The years that he spent in jail honed his expertise in community organizing.

After his release, Shantz was given a job by his former lawyer John Conroy to oversee the renovation of an office building next door to Conroy’s office in Abbotsford, B.C.

It was here that Shantz literally stumbled across the city’s homeless community, when he came across a woman sleeping in the doorway. He soon came to identify with people contending with addiction issues and homelessness.

He put his problem-solving and community-organizing skills, accrued in prison, into action.

In archival footage in the film, Shantz is seen leading protests with his trademark quip about Abbotsford being the murder capital of Canada. Contrasted with that characterization is the large number of churches that line the streets, some of them next to homeless encampments.

As Shantz became more involved with the unhoused community in both Abbotsford and Vancouver, he staged events like bringing bags full of syringes into Abbotsford city hall to make clear the hypocrisy of a bylaw that didn’t allow the Fraser Health Authority to offer harm-reduction programs like those in major urban centres across Canada.

An unclear end, and what endures

One of the most compelling people interviewed in the film is journalist Marcie Good, who wrote a Vancouver Magazine profile of Shantz in 2012.

As Good explains, her mother and Shantz’s sister knew each other through quilting, and he affectionately called her “cuz” because of their shared Mennonite connection. Good is clear about Shantz’s epic ways, but the force of his personality is obvious. In the film, she says how she can still hear the sound of his voice, even years after his death.

The narrative of the film moves in multiple directions, backwards in time to the siblings’ shared childhood, and forward to the police shooting that took Shantz’s life. His larger-than-life nature, as well as the tumult of his struggles with his mental health are recounted through stories from family and friends.

The final chapter of Shantz’s life is, perhaps, the least clear. After moving to Lytton, his mental health appeared to precipitously decline.

On Jan. 13, 2020, Shantz’s partner Janet called 911 just after 8:00 a.m., explaining that she and her daughter were in the house with Shantz but were worried about his potential for self-harm. She is not interviewed in the film, nor are any of the RCMP police officers who were directly involved in the shooting.

The events of that day, including the six-hour standoff, are recounted by Ronald MacDonald, then the chief civilian director of the Independent Investigations Office of British Columbia, and Tonia Grace, a civil rights lawyer Farquhar asked to look into the IIO report about Shantz’s death.

Although the officers who were involved in the shooting were cleared of any wrongdoing, both women express their reservations with different aspects of the report.

The RCMP’s failure to adequately respond to the situation included issues such as not having a mental health professional on site, and not contacting anyone who was close to Shantz, such his adult son or his sister, to help. The facts of the incident were addressed at coroner’s inquest in July 2023.

Many aspects of Shantz’s death remain unresolved. But what endures is the love of the people who knew him best, sewn deep into their hearts and minds.

‘A Bullet Pulling Thread’ screens Aug. 13 and 14 at Cinecenta in Victoria.